Dumpling Time’s giant soup dumpling is a sign of the times, but a worthwhile one

King-Dum, a soup dumpling served with a straw at Dumpling Time on Friday, June 30, 2017, in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

Now, even more than before, every restaurant needs to open with a gimmick.

In the days when restaurant recommendations traveled by word of mouth, the gimmick was a signature dish so good that diners would rhapsodize over it to their friends, playing a telephone game of gloating and envy. Now that social media is the primary vector for FOMO transmission, the signature dish has evolved into an action item.

Dumpling Time’s action item — you’ll spot multiple videos of it on Yelp — is an oversized soup dumpling called the King-Dum, presented to the table with a fat bubble-tea straw for sucking the hot broth out.

At Omakase owner Kash Feng’s three-month-old Design District restaurant, which riffs on the Northern Chinese dumpling-and-noodle equation seen at restaurants like Kingdom of Dumpling and Shandong Deluxe, chef Edgar Agbayani balances the orthodox against the heretical. Feng’s mother has overseen the seasoning of the Xi’an-style pork dumplings, for example, to make sure no one messed with her memories.

3of 6Inside view of Dumpling Time in San Francisco.Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

4of 6A variety of dumplings headed out to customers at Dumpling Time in San Francisco.Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

5of 6Dumpling chef Do Leung works with dough at Dumpling Time in San Francisco.Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

6of 6King-Dum, a soup dumpling served with a straw at Dumpling Time in San Francisco.Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

The restaurant’s dumpling chef, Do Leung, who last worked at Tai Wu in Milpitas, turns out steamed chicken buns and egg custard buns no dedicated yum cha’er would sniff at. The tom yum soup dumplings and beet-pink steamed bao? Agbayani’s contribution.

As Feng and Agbayani were developing the menu, the two noticed that a New York City restaurant named Drunken Dumpling was garnering attention for chef Qihui Guan’s giant soup dumpling. Just as New York’s trademarked Cronut spawned San Francisco’s Cragels and Cruffins, the San Franciscans tweaked Guan’s invention, making it less sloshy and meatier, with a thinner skin.

Dumpling Time, in the Design District, makes a soup Dumpling the size of a grapefruit

Video: Jonathan Kauffman / sfchronicle.com

For the King-Dum, Leung makes a pate-smooth filling of shredded pork belly and a thick, gelatinous chicken stock that has been chilled solid. He seasons the meat with ginger, green onion and sesame oil, and then packs it into a grapefruit-sized ball, spiral-pleating the wrapper and tugging the topknot to a point. The King-Dum takes around 12 minutes to steam, and comes to the table with a straw and an equally valuable piece of equipment: a saucer underneath the bamboo steamer basket to catch the leaks.

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Attempt to hoover up the dumpling’s scalding liquid too soon, and your neck may snap back so fast nearby customers may think you’ve been punched by a ghost. The sensible diners distract themselves with steamed buns while it cools. The impatient tell themselves that it only takes a few days for a scalded tongue to heal. Once the juice has been siphoned off and the camera returned to its pocket, it takes just a few seconds to shred the wrapper and inhale the rich, barely solid meat.

A gimmick, for sure, but not merely an Instagram post.

Dumpling Time, 11 Division St., at De Haro Street, San Francisco. (415) 525-4797 or www.dumplingtimesf.com. Open for lunch and dinner Monday-Saturday.

Jonathan Kauffman has been writing about food for The Chronicle since the spring of 2014. He focuses on the intersection of food and culture — whether that be profiling chefs, tracking new trends in nonwestern cuisines, or examining the impact of technology on the way we eat.

After cooking for a number of years in Minnesota and San Francisco, Kauffman left the kitchen to become a journalist. He reviewed restaurants for 11 years in the Bay Area and Seattle (East Bay Express, Seattle Weekly, SF Weekly) before abandoning criticism in order to tell the stories behind the food. His first book, “Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat,” was published in 2018.